Thomas Koner & Jana Winderen - Cloitre

Recorded live from the cloisters at Evreux Cathedral, Normandy, France by Franck Dubois, 14th June 2014, as part of L'Ateliers

Track listing:

1. Cloître

Reviews:

Sly Vinyl:

Here’s another conversation piece to put in to your collection, readers. This record revolves around the recordings of multiple records’ locked grooves, which as you all know, serve as a barrier between the label and the needle. Achim Mohné is a sound artist (an artist in general, I suppose) from Cologne, Germany. These locked groove recordings you hear on the preview of this record come from a record collection spanning over sixteen years. As the record synopsis states, and as you can infer, each record’s locked groove is going to sound unique due to a wide array of factors – age, number of plays, dust, scratches, and so on. This could possibly be considered ambient to my ears, but again with something such as this, whether you can call this music or not is entirely up to you. These “non-music��? records tend to fetch a prettier penny as time goes on in case you want to sell, but as I wrote, this, if nothing else, could be a great conversation piece. Another interesting aspect: you can play this at any speed you like. Check out the preview of Accelerated Standstill by going through the Buy Now link below and see what you think of it. Cheers!

Barely a month before the release of "Tiento de las Nieves", Touch released a (WAV-only) download performance by Thomas Köner and Jana Winderen .

This 45 minute piece was recorded live at Evreux Cathedral, Normandy, France in june 2014.

The characteristic Köner drones perfectly match with Winderen's processed environmental sound recordings. �?nd with some live environment sounds, by the way: a faraway emergency siren, some birds, church bells ringing, audience coughs.

The resulting piece is completely absorbing: it must've been quite an impressive experience to attend this performance at the square garden between the cathedral and the bishop's palace.

"That night of June 2014 in Evreux, Normandy, they fashioned together a very discreet and evolutionary soundscape, which included mist, birds, slow – very slow – breathing, celestial humming, rain… all of which integrate a panorama their common music designs, which is not necessarily cold."

No physical release, unfortunately, which may be a pain for some collectors. But still we should thank Touch for distributing a recording that otherwise would've probalby remained unavailable.

This is a 44-minute single-piece live recording made in France in 2014 and available in download-only format from Touch or, for unlimited access, bleep.com. An extremely well balanced piece, it combines Köner's frigid yet comforting slow-motion drone textures derived from electronically-treated gong sounds with Jana Winderen's transparent, summery, semi-pastoral environmental recordings. In fact, at the 24 minute point, it sounds as though Köner begins to play a section from his second album 'Teimo' from the early 1990's. The piece evolves glacially and on occasion there are sounds that can be identified, such as screeching swifts in the distance overhead. [Alan Haselden]

The Quietus (UK):

Cloitre, her live collaboration with Thomas Köner from earlier this year effortlessly forges a fiction by bringing together not just two experienced sound artists together but by adding the additional dimension of a reverberrent space to their emanations. Performed in the cloisters of a cathedral in Normandy, this third 'collaborator' suited Köner and Winderen's output perfectly - a reverent space designed for silence into which the pair gradually pour their recordings of bat and bird song, ice crevasses, submarine ambience, winds and vapours. Like Out Of Range, despite the wildlife hissing, chirruping and twittering, the overall feeling is that of floating in an undiscovered environment. There are seriously deep, sinking sensations at work here, as if descending through the other side of the ocean into a deserted lagoon at the bottom of a vast chasm, the only suggestion of human life is the rare toll of a church bell, presumably provided by the venue and not the players. As such it would be the perfect soundtrack for Ballard's early climate fiction, at times reminding of both The Drowned World's tropical temperatures and flooding, and The Crystal World's solidifying jungle. [Russell Cuzner]